Evanescent is Professor’s Latest Examination of How We Consume Nature

Associate Professor of Art Maja Godlewska has a new set of paintings that explore our notions of nature and our experience of the outdoors. On virtual view at Toshkova Fine Art, the beautiful works in Evanescent reflect her research, observing tourists in the Pacific Northwest, Tasmania, and the Low Country of South Carolina.

“Instagrammable landscapes, the tourist gaze, and nature travel have been inspiring my work,” she says. “I have been following tourists searching for the ultimate natural beauty, to be captured, uploaded, and validated on social media. I have been exploring anthropocentric notions of wilderness, of the pristine and unspoiled land, and the phenomenology of the landscape – for some just a destination, for others, a place of memory and history.”

Godlewska has been documenting people outdoors for several years. In 2014 and 2017, she had summer residencies in Mauritius and Key West (Florida), respectively, where she watched the “almost choreographed” behavior of tourists as they “consumed nature.” In the summer of 2018, her research took her on a tour of U.S. National Parks, and the following summer she was an artist-in-residence at the University of Tasmania, Cradle Coast, working on a project related to local landscapes. Each time, she has created a new body of work from those studies.

The effects of the pandemic – the proliferation of screen-mediated experiences, the travel restrictions, the solitude at home – may be changing our way of seeing and being in the natural world, Godlewska says. “An immersive experience in nature has now gained a new urgency, as we are forced to stay in place, often isolated and longing for the outdoors.”

Evanescent includes four large scale paintings plus a triptych, The View, which will be on view in Rowe Galleries this fall during the Art & Art History Faculty Exhibition.

Pictured: Top, detail from Southern Ocean 2